Top 10 reasons you should fall in love with Power BI

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Are you thinking that what’s good about Power BI? Some of us do not fully understand what Power BI is and why it is unique in the world of Business Intelligence? Here you go.

A Microsoft invention, Power BI is a new cloud-based Business Intelligence service. You can use it for free to connect data, generate reports, and build dashboards. It will also help you to monitor the health of your business.

Here are some reasons why you should Power BI.

Collaborate with ease

Build reports and then email it to other stakeholders for their consideration and input! Email reports allow the participants to have an up-to-date view of the report and its data.

You can even create amazing reports and share the links with the management. Now, there is no more need to send reports and number in emails as attachments.

Drag and drop approach to build visualization

You can easily create good looking reports in Power BI. Simply, connect to data sources, then drag and drop fields from those sources to your report. Power BI support types of charts, such as bar and column charts, regular bar/column, line charts, area charts, pie charts, etc.

You have the liberty to modify existing reports. For example, changing a pie chart to donut chart.

See reports with data converged from multiple sources

Power BI allows you to pull data from a large number of data sources. You can generate amazing looking reports developed from different sources.

Periodic and scheduled data refresh

Do you want to make sure that your data is the latest? Power BI allows scheduling data refresh. This way you can view updated reports and dashboards. There is no need for you to worry about manually refreshing the data again and again.

Access on mobile devices

Power BI is compatible with Apple, Android, and Windows mobile devices. It means that you can view reports and dashboards anywhere through your mobile device.

Natural Query Search

“What is the revenue for the third quarter?” Power BI replies with the answer – $33,400,851. This easy and intuitive way to use Power BI comes from its natural language search feature. Isn’t it awesome!

You can go further and tell Power BI to provide the answer in the desired visualization. For example, “show this year’s revenue vs. last year’s revenue as bar chart.” And the result comes in the visual bar chart.

Power BI for desktop

The desktop version of Power BI is available free of cost. Install it on your computer and you will be able to connect to data sources and build reports. You can also use Power Query Formula Language, Data Analysis Expressions, and other add-ins like power query, power pivot, power view as well as power map.

Personalized Dashboards

Power BI enables you to create personalized dashboards to monitor the most important data. It provides a consolidated view across the organization regardless of where the data lives. Each metric can be viewed on the dashboard as a tile.

To use a content part, you need to install it and provide credentials. Once entered, within seconds it will build pre-configured reports and dashboards. You can easily view the data and immediately see trends!

It’s Free

With certain limits, you can use Power BI free of cost. These limits are very achievable because as a free user you can generate reports, build dashboards, connect to data, manipulate data, view data on your mobile device, etc. The other reasons described subsequently are supported with the free Power BI!

As a free user, you need to stay in 1 GB data limit. You cannot create content packs (a way to package and distribute reports and dashboards). Automatic data refresh is limited to only once a day. Besides these limitations, you still have enormously powerful capabilities.

Conclusion

So, what’s so good about Power BI? The best answer is –

Power BI is a very feature rich and powerful tool that comes without any cost. It’s easy and intuitive for beginners and satisfies needs of power users.